In the end, I opted for a day trip to Salisbury. According to both tradition and law, Salisbury is ranked as a "City" because it is the home of a Cathedral of the Church of England, and the seat of a Bishop. But by geographic standards, it's better described as a comfortably medium-sized town, with a central district chock-full of old buildings -- far more of them per hectare than most British cities can boast.
At the end of one shopping street you find this ancient gate, and passing through it you find yourself in the middle of a very large open green space, surrounded by buildings of many time periods.
This is the Cathedral Close, an area of land belonging to the Cathedral and under control of the Bishop. This is the largest Cathedral Close in the United Kingdom, and by quite a wide margin. And in the middle is the crown jewel of Salisbury, the Cathedral.
This particular Cathedral pushes to the limits in several interesting and somewhat contradictory directions. It was built in the 1100s, uncommonly quickly (a matter of less than forty years, and for a hand-crafted stone church on this scale that's FAST!). Thus, the entire structure displays uncommon unity of design and appearance. That also brings up the second key fact, namely that the Early English Gothic style exemplified by this particular Cathedral was very plain and unornamented. Indeed, windows were not often filled with coloured glass but with a palette of assorted greys. The interior is dominated by the light grey limestone of the walls and the polished dark Purbeck marble used in some of the supporting columns.
One of the few notes of colour is struck by the vivid contemporary Gabriel Loire window in the chapel behind the main altar.
The result, compared to some of the later cathedrals, is rather austere and even plain in appearance, yet still has undoubted majesty and beauty of form. The open nave running the full length of the church, uninterrupted, is among the tallest in England, and also somewhat narrower than many others, creating an impression of even more lofty heights.
The immense spire is the tallest in England and, at 123 metres, is one of the tallest stone spires in the world. It was added two centuries later, but definitely signals a more outgoing, even vaunting approach to the Cathedral's development. It has also caused a great deal of difficulty, due to the immense extra weight it imposes on the building (calculated at 6500 tonnes). Special measures have had to be taken to prevent the weight of the spire bringing about its own collapse. If you stand next to one of the four columns that form the main crossing and support the tower, and look straight up along the column, you can see it bending inwards. Extra stone and metal supports in a number of key places have been used to stabilize the spire. Even so, it leans out of a true vertical alignment.
Next to the Cathedral on its southern side is the Cloister, again the largest one in the British Isles. This would have served as a place of meditation for the priests and canons of the Cathedral, and in warmer weather could also have been used for eating, reading, or working.
Off the east side of the Cloister is the Chapter House (photographs, alas, are not allowed). Here is displayed one of the real treasures: one of only four authentic copies of Magna Carta, the Great Charter signed by King John in 1215 which stands at the root of most of the legal system of the U.K. and Canada, among others. It's been carefully preserved, and it's amazing to look at this vellum document and reflect that next year it will be 800 years old!
I first came to Salisbury in 1979, and that's 35 years ago now! I was 25 at the time. Even at that young-ish age, I took one look at the exterior and interior and realized that this Cathedral's design had a huge influence on the architect of St. James Anglican Cathedral in Toronto. Although executed on a much smaller scale, the design of St. James echoes many features of Salisbury, not least the groups of three pointed windows, the centre one taller than the two others. It's also not hard to see that the spire of St. James, and its height relative to the rest of the structure, find a precedent at Salisbury.
By the way, any of you familiar with Salisbury Plain may be wondering if I also visited the other famous historical monument of the region, Stonehenge. The answer is "No". I have been to Stonehenge twice in the past, and both times have found it disappointing. Due to the size of crowds, there have to be extensive parking lots and walking trails around the site, while access to the interior of the stone circles is normally forbidden. It's impossible to come to grips with any kind of mystical quality when surrounded by clamouring tourists all getting in each other's way with cameras. Even the size of the stones doesn't make a noticeable impact on me when I have to be content to look at them from so many metres' distance.
(Not only that, but I never saw any armadillos, either singly or in pairs.)
By contrast, at Salisbury an hourly prayer is offered for a few minutes at the top of the hour throughout the day. When the voice came over the PA system announcing the prayer, silence fell throughout almost all of that vast church. Silence takes on an extra weight and perhaps meaning when experienced in a very large space like this. The quality missing at Stonehenge came through very clearly indeed for me during that short prayer time.
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